The transport systems of many large cities, including London, Paris and Singapore, require users to have a proprietary transit card in order to pay for their journey. The issuance of the proprietary card for each transport system may be in the tens of millions.
Typically, a proprietary transit card allows a user to store single ride tickets, season tickets, a prepaid balance or a combination of any of these on it. The systems are card centric in that the card ultimately holds the correct and current set of data for that user.
The following describes a typical use of proprietary transit card by a user of a transport system. At the start of their journey, the user presents their transit card on a reader/validator. This is sometimes referred to as ‘tapping-in’. The reader attempts to establish the valid products on the card and select the correct one for the journey from that location. When using the prepaid element, the reader firstly looks to see if there are sufficient funds on the card to pay for the minimum fare from that point. If there are sufficient funds, the maximum fare may be deducted. Although deducting the maximum fare may cause the balance on the card to go overdrawn, it acts as an incentive for the user to always tap-out. When leaving the transport system at the end of a journey, the users again present their transit card on a reader/validator. This is sometimes referred to as ‘tapping-out’. The reader then calculates the fare dependent on the start and end locations of the journey and updates the balance on the card accordingly.
There is a general desire for proprietary cards to be phased out and for transport systems to allow users to tap-in and tap-out using standard bank issued cards, with the payment for the journey made as an online or offline transaction. This is a lot more convenient for users of a transport system who are not required to own a separate card that can only be used for the single purpose of travelling on a specific transport system. Preferably, any contactless chip credit, debit, commercial, prepaid or charge card or other device could be used to make payments on public transport services. A user of such a transport system would tap-in with their standard issue bank card prior to travelling on the transport system and tap-out with the same card at the end of the journey. The charged amount may depend on the locations, mode of transport and the time of day that the card was tapped-in and tapped-out.
Important to the effective operation of a transport system are mechanisms to ensure that users are not able to evade payment for their journeys. Barriers at the entry and exit of a transport system are an important deterrent but they are not suitable for all environments and it may be possible for a sufficiently motivated individual to jump or otherwise bypass them in order to avoid tapping-in and tapping-out. Furthermore parts of a system, or some entire systems, may be unmanned and rely on alternatives such as platform validators whereby the user is trusted to tap in and out on the correct validators to indicate where and when they travelled—clearly these systems may be more open to abuse by any individual who intends on defrauding the transit agency. Accordingly, transport systems often have inspectors who travel on the system and verify that users travelling on the transport system have taken the appropriate steps to secure their right to travel. Even though inspectors can only verify a relatively small number of all of the users of a transport system in this manner, knowledge of their presence, and the threat of a punitive fee and/or criminal prosecution if caught, is an effective deterrent against users trying to avoid payment of their journey.
When users of a transport system have a physical ticket or a purpose-issued transit card, an inspector can easily check that a user has paid, or tapped-in, for a journey as all that the inspector requires to verify the user's behaviour is the physical ticket or to read the data stored on the card or visually inspect a printed ticket. However, a problem arises when a standard issue bank card is used to tap-in for a journey as there is no data stored on the card that will inform the inspector whether the card has been used to tap-in as required.
More particularly, the current state of the art for verifying if a standard issue bank card has been used to tap-in to a transport system typically operates as follows. When the card is tapped-in at a fixed terminal at an entry to the transport system, the fixed terminal sends the ID and other data read from the card to a back office for use in fare calculation and other processes. An inspector on the transport system will have a portable device for reading ID and other data from users' cards. The read card data by the inspector is then transmitted to the back office. At the back office, processing is performed overnight, i.e. at the end of the transport system's operating day, to verify that the read card data corresponds to a card that has been tapped-in. If the card data read by the inspector does not correspond to a tapped-in user, then it is determined that a penalty should be issued to the inspected user.
A problem with the above technique for inspecting a standard issue bank card is that the inspector has very limited ability at the time of inspection to determine whether or not the user has tapped-in as required. The inspector may therefore be unable to issue a legally binding penalty fare notice (usually paper-based) to the user. Moreover, if the user is unregistered with the transport system, and their name and address are not known by the transport system so, even if the back office detects a user who has not paid for their journey, the back office will have insufficient information to issue a legally binding penalty fare notice to the user and this results in a lower penalty, or no penalty at all, being applied.
An additional problem is that the user experience is poor since, unlike with proprietary transit cards, a user is not informed that they have passed the inspection at the time of the inspection. For example, a user may have more than one card suitable for paying for their journey. If the user accidentally presents a different card to the inspector than that used when tapping-in, the user will be incorrectly detected in the end of day processing as someone who has not attempted to pay even though the user thought that they would pass the inspection.
There is therefore a need to improve the inspection, or verification of the behaviour, of users of a transport system when standard bank cards, or other non-proprietary media, are used to pay for journeys.